Making Rare Materials Visible to the World

Posted May 8, 2017byannes

Scanning all kinds of material has become a common task thanks to the availability of devices like Flip-Pal and special phone apps like Pic Scanner for iphones or Google PhotoScan for android phones. But what do you do with a book that is nearly 6 feet by 7 1/2 feet when opened? The British Library recently faced this challenge when it digitized its copy of the 1660 Klencke Atlas, one of the world’s largest books. The library made a video of the process available on YouTube recently. The Klencke Atlas contains 41 wall-sized, extremely rare maps. These maps reveal what Dutch cartographers knew about the world during the High Renaissance period. The public domain images of the atlas are part of the British Library’s Picturing Places online resource.